Moral Agency, Not an Agency of Morals

“Born into a world of enemies, surrounded by violent racial hate, with no obvious means of protection, Lupescu did what she had to do: she auctioned off her body – the only thing she had to sell – to each and every bidder, playing one off against the other, all the way up to the king. As always in the Balkans, bare survival provides precious little room for moral choices.”

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. “

– Anatole France

“Well, it seems that Good is that which results in more Moral Agency (as opposed to more automation).Instead of mere reaction, one can choose between X and Y. Becoming more of a moral agent means that one can chooce between X and Y and Zed. And then Aleph. And so on.

Conversely, evil would, it seems to me, lead down a path of X and Y and Zed and Aleph (and so on) to an ability to only choose between X and Y and Zed. And then only X and Y.”

This post may well be what finally leads to the forced deactivation of my Secret Libertarian Decoder Ring, but I don’t think it should, since I’ve argued for the legitimacy of strong social safety nets before. And although this piece is primarily directed at libertarians and conservatives, I hope our liberal-leaning readership will appreciate it (think of it as an attempt to explain a key project of liberalism in the Conservatarian language).

In any event, I think Jaybird’s quote above is a pretty good example of how the average non-anarchist libertarian would (if pressed) view the proper role of government, to wit: the maximization of individual moral agency at a particular moment in time, the antithesis of which is the legislation of morality. Obviously, libertarians typically prefer certain means for the achievement of this and may phrase it differently, but generally speaking, even the minarchist libertarian envisions that a government is necessary to protect the right to exercise moral agency. For instance, as Jaybird argues in the post above, theft is the removal of moral agency from a particular individual. For what it’s worth, I entirely agree with this, which is why I find the Anatole France quote above a terribly unpersuasive argument for Marxism.

But the very concept of “theft” presupposes the existence of a uniform system of property rights, guaranteed and enforced by the government. And, while many libertarians may find a more or less Lockean system of property rights to be superior, the fact is that any system of property rights implies a system of enforced morality as to who should and should not own property; ie, whether the owner of a piece of land is the person who first laid claim to it or the person who first worked it or the person who most worked it or the person who most recently worked it requires that the State place real restrictions on the moral agency of those it decides against. I’m treading into Jason’s territory here (and I expect him to thus utterly dismantle me rhetorically), but I have a difficult time avoiding the conclusion that, as such, systems of property rights are ultimately better classified as positive liberties than negative liberties. Regardless, few non-anarchist libertarians – myself included – would acknowledge that systems of property rights are really the legislation of morality, at least not as long as they are uniformly enforced. And indeed, systems of property rights are ultimately necessary to permit individuals to maximize their moral agency. For that matter, the lack of a uniformly accepted system of property rights can even almost completely eliminate the capacity for moral agency since “bare survival provides precious little room for moral choices.”

So we’ve established that, in order to maximize aggregate individual moral agency, one needs to somewhat arbitrarily restrict the exercise of certain types of moral agency. This is not without widespread effects, and libertarians should not pretend otherwise. The ownership of a certain (unknown) amount of property, whether real, personal, or liquid, is largely a prerequisite to a particular individual, group, family, or tribe to reach a point where “bare survival” is not an issue that “provides precious little room for moral choices.” Moreover, in a capitalist economy without safety nets, one needs property to gain property, and a pretty respectable amount of property to gain enough property to reach a state where meaningful moral agency is something other than an unattainable luxury.

Social safety nets and the taxes that support them are, ultimately, little more than an attempt to define property rights in such a way that the moral agency of those who would otherwise be deprived of their moral agency is restored.

Are we really better moral agents than the abolitionist movement? How about the Fathers of the American Revolution? How about that awesome Muslim period that lasted a couple hundred years? How about the Romans? How about the Greeks?

The past is another country. I don’t feel that the ground I stand upon is firm enough for me to say that, of course, we’re better at this than they are. It reminds me of the folks who point out that, of course, we’re better than China. Of course, we’re better than Canada. Of course, we’re better than Denmark.

My answer to Jaybird’s set of questions is “I have no idea.” But I do think it’s safe to say that it’s no coincidence that the American Revolution – sparked by moral questions about rights in a rather well-off set of colonies – was far less savage than the French Revolution, which was sparked in the midst of a “bare survival” famine that hit the peasantry particularly hard.

I also think that it’s no coincidence that the abolitionist movement (and really any number of social reform movements) began with a small set of elites, with the last fiercely anti-abolition holdouts in the North coming from the ranks of the most desperately poor immigrants.

All of which is to say that, although I would not claim that we, as a society, are more (or less, for that matter) capable of exercising moral agency than the Abolitionist Movement, I would claim that social safety nets are useful and necessary to assure that all of us in a society are capable of possessing a meaningful amount of moral agency.

I’ll conclude by turning back to the Anatole France quote. As I said above, I find it a terribly unpersuasive argument for communism or for the doing away of property rights. But it does imply something that can’t be ignored: the enforcement of property rights often requires that the State engage in profound moral judgments and preferences that have absolutely nothing to do with any conception of “equality before the law.” If this is true, then it suggests a tremendous flaw in the way we have chosen to define property rights, at least if we think property rights should and do represent something other than the legislation of morality. There are really only two ways to remedy this flaw: the abolition of property rights entirely, which is obviously unacceptable; or we use this magnificent invention we call currency to attempt to approximate the damage caused by uniform enforcement of property rights and make whole those whose moral agency our enforcement of property rights has restricted.

*I acknowledge that this quote itself has nothing to do with social safety nets, but it was fresh in my mind and I thought it a poignant example of how the need to survive can make moral agency a luxury good.

But the very concept of “theft” presupposes the existence of a uniform system of property rights, guaranteed and enforced by the government.

I disagree in part because it proves too much. If we lived without a government, and if I killed you, I am forced by your reasoning to infer that I have done no wrong. The very concept of murder, you might say, presupposes the existence of a set of laws against it, enforced by the government.

So murdering isn’t a moral wrong in itself, and we do nothing improper when we kill one another, for whatever the reason, unless a government says so.

From here we can multiply the examples until the government is the only source of everything that is ever good or right in the world. But this can’t be correct.

The flaw in the reasoning is uncovered when we consider that government is not the creator of these moral imperatives, but only a guarantor that the malevolently inclined will nonetheless abide by them. Other guarantors exist, including our natural right to self-defense, which we almost all still readily employ in emergencies or when the government is not available, and our right as a sovereign people to alter the government when it’s not doing its job properly.

The existence of these other guarantors suggests that government is merely one factor among several that together help supply us with an orderly civil society, in which a pattern of at least roughly predictable rules prevails. These rules will ideally be (a) guaranteed by a variety of sound institutions and practices, (b) have the support of natural moral reasoning, and (c) lead to the overall flourishing of the society in question.

Obviously (b) and (c) take a lot of unpacking, but the short answer is to just go read Kant. Internal consistency and universal applicability go a long, long way. But these don’t come from the government. They come from the power of reason — admittedly all too limited — to command general assent in a society of mostly good-willed people. We use government not to create the rules, but to make sure that those who would deny their existence don’t get the upper hand.

We have no guarantees of these foundations, of course. But I’d still maintain the overall contention that the written law is at its best an attempt to capture a higher and more universal social law, and that we improve the written law by considering what that more universal law truly is.

Property rights and their proper derivation are the subject not of a blog post or comment, but of a book. But here I would simply say that humans are the planmaking animals. Plans over time are how we survive. For plans ever to have a hope of succeeding — that is, for humans to have a chance to survive according to their natures — there must be an observable regularity about the objects we employ in them.

Many possibilities exist for how we might set up such a regularity, and private property here competes very obviously with collective ownership. I’d say the reason private property is superior is best articulated by Hayek. No one person or agency can know enough to run an entire society and provide for the wants and needs of all. Particularly not when all of them are out obeying their natures and making plans of their own.Report

@Jason Kuznicki, You think that the relationship of a person to herself is as arbitrary and in need of external socially-ontologically constructed buttressing as the relationship of that person to the inanimate objects around her that society calls “ownership” is?Report

I can’t say I follow. The fact is that any society is going to have understandings of each (relationship to self and relationship to inanimate objects), and that these understandings will have a variety of rewards and penalties attached, by a variety of mechanisms, through a variety of institutions, and that any good society is going to permit us to reason publicly about them. I’m not sure where you are headed with it, though.Report

@Jason Kuznicki, “The flaw in the reasoning is uncovered when we consider that government is not the creator of these moral imperatives, but only a guarantor that the malevolently inclined will nonetheless abide by them. Other guarantors exist, including our natural right to self-defense, which we almost all still readily employ in emergencies or when the government is not available, and our right as a sovereign people to alter the government when it’s not doing its job properly.”

But your example of murder! I do think we could find moral sanction against it outside of the government or any other social institution…maybe…but even so, in this particular case I think “theft” provides a much surer example of a wrong that is only made so when defined by government/the law. As Thompson notes, without rules declaring otherwise, there is no clear understanding (at least not one that occurs in nature/a priori) of “ownership.” Is one’s property being “one’s” property based on who got there first, who mixed their labor, who could make the “best” use of it, or who was most powerful and could forcibly take it?

Either way, I don’t think your Kantian imperatives would hold up outside of social context, that is, without knowledge of social interaction or a socially defined community. If Kant were alone and the only human to exist his imperatives would not disappear so much as become incomprehensible. They require one take into account the rest of humanity, there is an inherit social component which far from being co-incidental, I think is actually at the heart of sustaining the moral imperatives. And that it’s the same social component which comes back again in the form of government, tribal rule, etc. that yields a understanding of property rights and imbues these rights with any higher meaning.Report

I have a post in me arguing that Ayn Rand is deep in her heart of hearts a Kantian, but she didn’t know it, probably because she didn’t understand Kant very well. Perhaps it’ll show up as a Friday think piece sometime.Report

Social safety nets and the taxes that support them are, ultimately, little more than an attempt to define property rights in such a way that the moral agency of those who would otherwise be deprived of their moral agency is restored.

This is one of the things that I’ve been struggling with when it comes to social safety nets.

In my original essay, I touched on this when I said: This is why stealing is wrong, for example. It takes options away from someone, and yet we see how a “Robin Hood” situation makes us waver. Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor also increases decision-making ability.

I mean, seriously. Look at Bill Gates. Let’s say we give him a hundred bucks. He doesn’t even notice. He makes $250 in the time it takes for the elevator to open after he pushes the button. $100 makes *NO* difference to his life *AT ALL*.

Let’s move down a ways and talk about giving you or me or any given reader of this website $100. It’s not a game-changer, but it’s got a hell of a lot more marginal utility than for Bill Gates. That’s a wonderful date with the spouse, or a game for one and a book for the other, or one less thing that has to be worried at this week. It doesn’t change much, but it is a small and pleasant windfall.

Now let’s go to one of those Fourth World countries. $100 is *LIFECHANGING*. It’s the difference between clean water and typhus. It’s the difference between the baby dying and the baby making it to 5 years old. It’s the difference between a village starving and a village making it. It’s a life or death amount. You thought there was a big shift in marginal utility for Bill Gates and you/me? It’s *NOTHING* compared to the marginal utility change between you/me and folks living like savages in 4th world countries.

So, then… wouldn’t the moral thing be to take the money from Bill Gates and turn the 4th World countries into, at least, 3rd World ones?

@Jaybird, “So, then… wouldn’t the moral thing be to take the money from Bill Gates and turn the 4th World countries into, at least, 3rd World ones?”

This is something that bugs the hell out of me, as well. It always seemed arbitrary to me that we were more concerned with bolstering safety nets in our own, relatively wealthy countries than in creating them in Fourth World countries.

Believe it or not, thinking about things in the way I describe above helps it seem a lot less arbitrary. The question still bugs the hell out of me, but increasingly I’m realizing that short of doing something that involves a lot of doing the ultimate act of depriving someone of moral agency (ie, war and killing), there’s very much a practical limit to how much good foreign aid can do.

Additionally, I’m recognizing that the minimum level of property necessary to the meaningful exercise of moral agency can vary substantially from society to society and country to country and from era to era. As I suggested yesterday, the rise of our (elite-driven) cultural emphasis on credentialism (and credentials really have become a form of property in so many ways) provides a pretty heavy restriction on the moral agency of those unable to afford credentials, thereby justifying a stronger safety net.

Lastly there is the fact that definitions and enforcement of property rights are inherently not uniform across political boundaries – indeed, political boundaries have quite often in history been little more than geographical demarcations of different systems of property rights. If you read taxation and safety nets as merely a part of the definition of property rights, then suddenly spending that $100 on a wealth transfer here rather than sending it to a Third World country seems a lot less arbitrary.Report

@Mark Thompson, I want to tread carefully here… one problem that I think that we ought avoid like plague would be arresting development.

Let’s say you’ve got kids. Adolescent kids. What’s the best thing for them? Well, a swat upside the head, instructions to straighten up and fly right, and forced to get a paper route/baby sitting job will result in… eventually… an adult.

If you give the kid an allowance until he’s 22, if you buy him cars and pay for his insurance, if you make it so that he doesn’t *NEED* a job, he’s not likely to GET a job.

Next thing you know, you’ve got a 22-year old without a resume.

You get a kid who has to pay for his own car, his own gas, his own insurance, his own entertainment, next thing you know, you’ve got a 22-year old who is on a management track.

Right?

Now this is *COMPLETELY* different from the “charity” that is providing him with a room with a bed, and regular meals. Providing a bed and meals is what the kid needs. Beyond that will arrest his development.

So I wonder how much of our social safety net results in arrested development and, if we’re going to be taking money from this guy to give to that guy, wouldn’t it be better off given to the guy who needs a bed and meals than giving it to the guy who needs gas?

“See Greg Mankiw on the long duration of unemployment, and see Mark Thoma citing David Altig on the relatively high number of job vacancies relative to unemployment. I would explain both of those phenomena as being due to destruction of human capital. Under the 2007 pattern of specialization and trade, some workers had human capital which suddenly depreciated. It is difficult to create a new pattern.”

Should that be a surprise? Folk Marxism dominates most of industrial nations in Europe and has a strong presence here.

Folk Marxism always costs. For a long time the cost was pretty cheap and most people acquiesced to paying it. Now, the cost has gone up dramatically, and there’s a lot more people (both here and in Europe) who are ready to repudiate folk Marxism. Whether or not they get the opportunity to do so is what politics is going to be about, probably for the next decade or so.Report

@ThatPirateGuy, I have a deep skepticism for the claim that the poor stay poor because they have it too cushy.

This was not my argument.

My argument was that development was arrested. It has nothing to do with “lazy” or “cushy” as much as the creation of moral hazard. I think that Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” was very much a step in the right direction.

There is nothing wrong with needing welfare… there is something very much wrong if one is on welfare and raises a child who then grows up to need welfare who then has a child who does so.

If there are 3rd generation children born into welfare, something is fundamentally wrong and we need to explore how and why we are arresting the development of the people we’re pretending to help.Report

@Jaybird, I don’t think anybody has ever doubted that having multiple generations born into welfare is a serious problem. However every time i have seen stats that group is always a smallish part of people who receive “welfare.” Most people who get gov help are on it for a relatively short period.

I’ve worked with many people who were stuck in multi-generational poverty. My sample is biased since i work in mental health, but still, a lot of those people who are stuck on welfare have a double butt load of problems. They usually have more then one helping of mental illness, substance abuse, physical abuse and chronic medical problems and not just in their selves but going back generations. There is no easy solution nor is “just suck it up” a remotely likely solution.Report

@Jaybird, This is why I favor a safety net system with no strings attached, in which the safety net is provided in as liquid and fungible a form as possible (ideally in the form of that remarkable invention called currency). The more strings that are attached, the more likely one’s development is to become arrested as moral decisions are removed from the recipient. The fewer strings that are attached, the more the recipient has the freedom to determine for himself what is necessary for “mere survival” and what is appropriate for moral calculus. In short, the more strings we put on that safety net, the more it ceases to serve its purpose as a guarantor of moral agency and indeed becomes an active tool for the suppression of same.Report

“This is why I favor a safety net system with no strings attached, in which the safety net is provided in as liquid and fungible a form as possible (ideally in the form of that remarkable invention called currency).”

Let’s also note that this emphasis on moral agency is not necessarily aligned with the plain humanitarian interest that motivates most people to support safety nets, ie feed the hungry clothe the naked etc.

How should we address that? Should we have one safety net to improve the moral agency of the economically disfavored and another one for humanitarian relief? If we only have the former how (if at all) do we address the other humanitarian concerns?Report

@Jaybird, well, consider that you obviously don’t believe that we should leave kids on the hill at 8 and see how that turns out in a decade either, even though a kid who made it through that could probably disassemble a sheep into food, clothing and shelter in 15 minutes by the time he was 22.

So, to use a recent political issue, where do you figure providing medical insurance for this hypothetical kid falls on the allowing to grow up vs. arresting development scale? Going down the list of liberal projects, i.e food, shelter, medicine, education, it seems to be a pretty strict subset of things that most parents think would retard their kids’ growth if they withheld rather than if they provided.Report

What exactly is there that is worse than when the government first got involved? Is education here worse than in 1634? Is starvation more prevalant than in 1931? Is medical care worse than in 1964? Up until our most recent recession, we had almost 15 straight years of sub 7% unemployment; is that a sign that we’ve been arresting the ability of people to enter the adult world? Your comment just sounds like a bunch of vague aspersions against the government rather than a list of actual problems with it.Report

@Jaybird, mostly it’s just that when you talk about gay marriage or marijuana dispenaries or police knocking down people’s doors or restricting free speech or gun rights, you obviously have a really strong and clear idea of what exactly the government’s doing wrong and why it should stop, even when I disagree. This comment, by contrast, just seems really, really tenuous. But I am a liberal, so take that with whatever grain of salt you desire.Report

@Bo, when I talk about the government not recognizing gay marriage, or busting dispensaries, or throwing pamphleteers in jail, these are things that are happening to individuals without their consent.

When I talk about stuff like education, or welfare, or down the list, I’m talking about things that (most) everyone agrees ought to be around to some degree and stand in line for… even as it slowly damages them like a cancer. There’s a part of me that thinks that I, at least, would be better off if I didn’t have to subsidize this cancer and if the people in line were responsible for paying for it themselves, maybe they’d fight for a non-carcinogenic version.

@Jaybird, I think a good encapsulation of what you’re talking about was a piece in the Knoxville Sentinel. Comments with links don’t tend to go through, so google “African experience converts a socialist”. You have to consider the source (the opinioneer, not the philantropist I mean), but I think there’s something to the notion.Report

It’s nor arbitrary. It’s having a nation. It’s a form of national solidarity. I think proximity (both in terms of physical and institutional) is a perfectly legitimate form of negotiation.

I mean, it’s arbitrary in the sense that I would help out my brother if he was in a financial jam but would not help out some guy on the street even if I completely believed the story of the financial jam he says that he is in.

The alternative to helping someone out within proximity is often not going to be helping out someone in a land far, far away. It’s buying a new iPod for yourself. I think this is a natural part of the human instinct. It sucks for the people far, far away, but it gives charity to those with some sort of relationship or connection within proximity.Report

“Social safety nets and the taxes that support them are, ultimately, little more than an attempt to define property rights in such a way that the moral agency of those who would otherwise be deprived of their moral agency is restored.”

To be honest I’m not really following the moral agency part of this argument and am skeptical of it. In the abstract, I think it’s an important part of personhood that everybody gets the same moral agency. As a practical matter cultural and economic factors are very important and can color our moral agency in obvious or subtle ways. I’m not sold on Mark’s theory of moral agency under socioeconomic pressure, but it’s probably as plausible as anything without digging on this significantly harder than I have.

But there’s a particular practical angle to social safety nets that needs to be addressed. We need to think about safety nets in terms of what ought to be done and what can be done.

Given what we know about economic history for the last 50 years or so, it seems pretty clear to me that very little can be done directly at the government level for the working poor, the unemployable or nearly so. What can be done is that the overall labor market conditions can improve to the extent that such people can participate in it and earn a living. And in our good times, that’s exactly what’s happened. Rich Karlgaard writes a poignant anecdote here:

This is where folk Marxism comes in (and the Hayekian-mainstream conservative rebuttal to it). In a prosperous economy, strong property rights are the rule, and safety nets (and national defense and salaries for customs inspectors, etc) are the exception. This is okay because most rules have exceptions. But whatever exceptions there are, are justified as exceptions and limited to them.

But as the exceptions grow and grow the justifications for them get weaker and weaker, the economy loses its ability to grow until it finally gives up the ghost, which is what we’re seeing here. As that happens we lose our prosperity and our ability to have effective safety nets.

Therefore, for those who like to say that they favor capitalism with safety nets, like Erik and Mark, there should always some justification of what those safety nets are supposed to look like and why they are feasible.Report

@Koz, I don’t find this very convincing. The reason is that it assumes that “strong social safety nets” are an exception to “strong property rights.” My whole point in this post is that safety nets are – or at least can be – an integral element of property rights. Indeed, on some level, property rights are themselves inherently a social safety net.

What is perhaps particularly telling here is to compare the US (with a low level of taxation and comparatively weak safety nets) to Denmark (with a high level of taxation and extraordinarily strong social safety nets) on the specific question of “strength of property rights.” Thankfully, there is an organization known as the Heritage Foundation that does the legwork on this question every year. You may be surprised to learn that Denmark’s score on that front is better than the US’, and has been for the last two years. Prior to that, the US and Denmark scored equally every year. Notably, the same story is evident with every single Scandinavian social democracy. This tells me that there is no evidence that social safety nets are at odds with strong property rights and that, instead, safety nets can be a legitimate and integral part of any system of property rights.Report

“I don’t find this very convincing. The reason is that it assumes that “strong social safety nets” are an exception to “strong property rights.” My whole point in this post is that safety nets are – or at least can be – an integral element of property rights. “

Of course, that’s exactly the part I’m disagreeing with.

The Scandanavian states are worth talking about more, but aside from that (and without getting too deep into Heritage’s methodology) there’s a very good reason why the US score below countries like Norway, etc. We have Demo majorities in all our political branches of gov’t and the activist mentality behind them is completely corrupted by folk Marxism.

I don’t know how closely you’ve been following the sovereign debt crisis, but in terms of gov’t policy and measurables the US is actually on par or below par with Germany and the big Euro industrial democracies. The reason why the PIIGS have a sovereign debt crisis and we don’t is because we still have Americans living in America and a significant number of them are motivated by an anti-folk Marxist mentality.

In short America, for the moment at least, is a nation of anti-folk Marxists being ruled by folk Marxists. Which are you?

If we cannot repudiate the folk Marxist rulers (and soon) we should expect that our property rights should continue to weaken relative Denmark, etc., and our possibilities of prosperity to weaken right along with it.Report

@Travis, Don’t start Travis, we’re still waiting on his rational fact based step by step explanation of how the GOP as it currently exists somehow represents the last best and only hope for prosperity in America today.Report

@North, I’m mightily curious Koz. You know the league tgakes guest posts. You could lay out your unassailable logic in a neat concise point by point fasion for all to see as opposed to depending on repeated unsupported declarations and allusions to explanations not yet provided.Report

Well then you should be reading Marx a little more closely, especially the labor theory of value. The idea is that value is produced by labor, and labor is produced by people collectively, ie, one person’s labor is the same thing as the next person’s. Therefore whatever money or goods capitalists or bankers end up with is necessarily an exploitation of the workers which can and should be resisted and reversed.

As this applies to our contemporary political scene, ie folk Marxism, the idea is that political economy is mostly about distribution. The overall level of economic production is a given, the point is to “fairly” distribute it to needy or politically favored people.

The opposite of folk Marxism is anti-folk Marxism, which says that economics is primarily a matter of production. Whoever does more, tends to produce more, and tends to get more. allowing for significant vagaries of distribution which we can’t do anything about.

The upshot is, folk Marxism is a widespread mentality that may or may not exist in some group of people, closely related to Marx’s philosophical work on economics (and not necessarily much to do with particular economic policies of Communist states).Report

@Koz, Ok, but the whole point here is that no particular theory of ownership is morally superior to another particular theory of ownership, but that a system of property rights (ie, a theory of ownership) is nonetheless necessary for a society to exist and prosper and for a meaningfully large number of individuals in that society to exceed “bare survival” such that the exercise of moral agency is something other than a luxury.

No matter which system of property rights (in the absence of social safety nets) you institute will result in the State picking winners and losers, with the “losers” defined as people who are effectively left out in the cold without sufficient access to resources that enable them to regularly undertake a moral calculus. If the goal of government is to maximize aggregate individual moral agency, ie, liberty then it must at least attempt to put the losers in a position where “bare survival” is not a concern.

This does not require a belief that profit and success are necessarily exploitation, nor does it require a belief that one person’s labor is the same as the next person’s, which is inherently a statement of moral value. Indeed, the statement that economics is inherently a matter of production takes an incredibly moralistic view of property rights just as any other theory of ownership must do.

My argument is that social safety nets should be seen as an attempt to define property rights in such a way as to minimize the moral intrusions of the state inherent in any theory of property rights.

We are left then to argue over how much of a safety net is necessary to do so and how much of a safety net goes too far and results in the state making an active moral statement in support of the safety net’s beneficiaries.Report

In fact, that’s a significant part of my point. The states’ ability to sort winners and losers is much more limited than people are supposing. And accordingly the state should give up trying and should be much more willing to let the winners win and losers lose.Report

@Koz, 1. That no system of property rights is inherently morally superior to another system ought to be self-evident. One system may be preferable to another under the tenets of a particular religion or set of cultural norms or what-have-you, but one cannot, a priori devise a universally applicable and moral system of property rights.

2. Re: picking of winners and losers….Group A has nomadically cared for, lived on, and lived off of a giant swathe of land for centuries according to their particular system of property rights. Suddenly Group B starts moving into this swathe of land and laying claims to it according to their particular system of property rights, which has the effect of deeply undermining Group A’s long-established practices of property rights. This inevitably leads to a dispute. The government is called in to resolve the dispute. This government shares a racial and cultural affinity with Group B. As such, the government chooses Group B as the winners and Group A as the losers. Group A is forced onto small parcels of land and to abide by Group B’s system of property rights. The residual effects of this last centuries.

OR….Group A are millions of slaves who work fields for a smattering of persons in Group B. They are slaves because Group B’s system of property rights defines them as property (ie, government has picked them to be the losers). Eventually the government changes the definition of property so they are no longer considered property but actual persons. Now government has to decide who owns the fields they used to work under penalty of death. The government – dominated by people of the same race as Group B – determines that the plantation owner still owns the fields, and the slaves own nothing. The government has picked winners and it has picked losers. The residual effects of this last centuries.

OR….In a particular system of property rights, everything is owned by “the State.” Citizens have no choice but to work for the State in a particular capacity. One day, this system of property rights collapses. What theory of property rights should be used to determine who now owns the factories? A labor theory that would give each worker a share? A management theory that would rest ownership in the people who guided the factory? Or a theory that would give title to the person who created the factory and ran it for personal profit (or, if he was clean, for the profit of the state)? The new, avowedly capitalist government, has close personal ties with the managers and/or the creators of the factory. The state chooses that group as the winners and the workers as the losers. This has residual effects that last quite some time.

3. I note that in each of the above scenarios, the end result is nonetheless a stable and prosperous economy in which the average lot of most people is improved. But what about the ones who were picked as losers? Not so much. The social safety net mitigates this. It says that the property rights granted at the conclusion of each scenario include a grant of property rights to the chosen losers to at least guarantee them the possibility of improving their lot in life/excercising moral agency/having the opportunity for more than just “mere survival.”Report

Please explain why the US did not score higher than it did between 1999 and 2008. Please explain why no nation scores higher than Sweden this year or Denmark last year. Is Heritage guilty of “folk Marxism” as well?

Do you understand the gaping difference between “Marxism” and “social democracy”?

Most importantly, though, I don’t see an actual attempt to rebut my point here that social safety nets are part and parcel of property rights and that property rights are inherently positive liberties.Report

“Do you understand the gaping difference between “Marxism” and “social democracy”?”

Folk Marxism is the superset of Marxism, ie Communist command economies, and social democracy. Ie, that the capital base and economic product of society is ultimately a collective asset and can and should be deployed to politically favored ends at the expense of the narrower interests of the property owner.Report

@Koz, But you’re presupposing here that Communist command economies, social democracies (aka European capitalism), socialist economies, and American capitalism all define “property owner” the exact same way.Report

@Koz, Meaning that your description of social democracy (which is not the same as socialism) as a belief “that the capital base and economic product of society is ultimately a collective asset and can and should be deployed to politically favored ends at the expense of the narrower interests of the property owner” …is only accurate if you presuppose that “property owner” has a consistent and universal definition across all societies. It doesn’t.Report

@Koz, this construct ignores the fact that there is ultimately only one capital base — our Earth. We do own it collectively, as a species, at least as long as we can survive to enjoy it in an organized social manner.

All divisions of that capital base are, at their root, arbitrary — lines on a map or lines of computer code.Report

That’s a very good point, and the main reason why folk Marxism is as persistent as it is. There is a level, our intuition leads us to believe that the capital base is a collective asset.

But, there’s at least two and some centuries of unbroken economic history to inform us that assertion of collective control of the economy is always non-economically optimal, and non-socially optimal too.Report

Another thing that bugs me is that, according to this (my) theory, smart people would tend to have more moral agency than dumb people (evidence would include the deferred gratification marshmallow experiment).

I guess what I’m getting at is that we accept this at the margins because it’s obvious. I don’t understand how we can’t have more layered thinking throughout the spectrum. Even among people that aren’t obviously brain-damaged or geniuses, there does seem to be a spectrum.

A while back I worked as a coder (and later supervisor of coders) and we took on a couple young turks that were in over their head and it was obvious from the get-go. We tried and tried to get them to understand concepts and patterns that almost anyone reading this blog* and it just never happened. It wasn’t that they weren’t motivated or that they didn’t want to do it. They just… couldn’t. Productivity (total, not per-seat) went up when they were let go.

If these people couldn’t understand the simple logic of a variation of HTML even though their jobs depended on it, how can we expect them to understand philosophy, theory, and morality the same way that you and I might. And if they can’t fully grasp the complexity of the concepts, how can we hold them as accountable as people that can?

* – Some of you might be thinking “Oh, well I hate math and stuff and couldn’t imagine programming either!” You’ll just have to trust me that this was ridiculously simple stuff. It wasn’t easy to be great at it, but basic competence was a really, really low-hanging fruit. It was far more common for people to be bored witless than to not be able to do it. I did it while watching episodes of The Office on the corner of my screen.Report

@Jaybird, I suppose I am kind of “no duh!” about it now, but it was a pretty substantial realization at the time. Partially that differences in intelligence could be so noticeable and intractable even among people that weren’t serious outliers, and partially the policy implications of this realization.Report

A clarification, I understand that moral agency is not the same thing as moral theory, but I do think that there are aspects that are intertwined. I choose morality because it’s one of the more complicated concepts. The same applies to simple cause-and-effect (which is essentially what coding is, once you learn the syntax) and coming to grips with the consequences of our actions (both what they are and why they are important).Report

@jaybird- First off, does anybody else find it really irritating when a part of a thread runs out of space/ links so we either have to drop down to the bottom or leave it hanging. I know i do.

so you wrote this “so then the solution to those problems seem to be… what?

Understand that their development is not, in fact, arrested and they are achieving to the top of their abilities and we (as a society!) ought continue to care for them in perpetuity?

I am certain that such will, once again, lead us to the conclusions that OWH (ptooey) reached almost a century ago.”

i don’t think of people in terms of developmentally arrested. I think there are people who are far on the negative tail end of the distribution in terms of having a really shitty deal in life. My bias not just as an evviiiiil liberal but also as person who has worked in mental health for years is that some people will need certain supports and help if they are function positively in society and avoid being a drag. Some people will need significant MH or substance abuse services and such. The people i’m thinking of have often ended up with their children in care of or under suupervision of the state. so the choice seems to me to give help and support to help people do better so the rest of us don’t have to care for their kids in a foster home or in youth detention.Report

@gregiank, dude, I don’t think of stuff as “evviiiiil liberal” vs. “good whatever” but “is what we’re doing today better than 10 years ago?” and the kicker “does it seem likely that we’ll like the answer to that question in 10 years?”

It seems to me that we’re outsourcing more and more and more responsibilities to someone else and setting it up so that more and more will be the responsibility of someone else.

@Jaybird, yes it is wrong, deeply wrong in every possible way….i kid .. i kid.

I think we are coming at this from very different points of view. Are we outsourcing more stuff to other people: I don’t know. I think looking at in a purely philosophical manner misses the pragmatic reality how some things are done. How do we not outsource child protection or community mental health? Beats me, but those are community tasks we have outsourced mostly for the reason that it is the only way they can be done. I don’t find it less moral to hire the gov to do certain tasks.Report

@gregiank, it seems to me that we outsource our childrearing to the government (if it weren’t for summer, would parents spend more or less time with their kids than, say, teachers in any given year), we outsource our charity to the government, goodness only knows what will happen with Health Care Reform *IN PRACTICE*…it seems to me that, eventually, this will implode.Report

Mark – I was hoping you were going to tackle this subject, since its the primary reason I have trouble calling myself a libertarian, even though you and I seem to agree on many things and you do call yourself a libertarian.

I think this is a good article and I don’t have a lot to add. My own personal justification of safety nets is not so much to do with moral agency – although I think thats a good point – as positive freedom. There are certain positive freedoms – being able to get enough to eat, having clean water, having a basic education – that are so basic to meaningful pariticpation in society that simply guaranteeing negative freedom can’t ever make up for them. Since – as you say – property rights at least partly assert a positive liberty themselves, some amount of transfer from haves to have nots can be justified.

This is probably a very poor argument (I’m neither a lawyer nor a philosopher), but its more convincing to me than the view that stops at negative rights and refuses to go any further. I have trouble calling myself a libertarian precisely because I don’t think you can justify safety nets off the back of a purely Lockean framework. The closest I can get is saying that any workable system of property rights necessarily has to protect more than can be justified by the owner’s need to be able to use it and recoup a benefit from whatever effort the put into it, which inevitably results in a shortage of certain kinds of property and windfalls coming to those who happen to own them. A safety net can make up for the necessary unfairness of even an ideal system of property rights (our actual system of course has far more sources of unfairness in it). But its a big leap from that to justifying an income tax …Report

@Simon K, Thanks, Simon. I think this is an important point that you make, even if you didn’t intend it as such: “My own personal justification of safety nets is not so much to do with moral agency – although I think thats a good point – as positive freedom. There are certain positive freedoms – being able to get enough to eat, having clean water, having a basic education – that are so basic to meaningful pariticpation in society that simply guaranteeing negative freedom can’t ever make up for them.”

I think this is absolutely typical of a lot of liberals to think of safety nets in this way. To be honest, it’s how the average person would (and perhaps should) think about them. But I would wager that my moral agency/property rights justification and your positive freedom argument are ultimately exactly the same argument, just with a vastly different vocabulary – a major reason that I think liberals and libertarians so often wind up talking past each other. In some ways, this post is more an attempt to translate liberal/ordinary person arguments for safety nets into language that libertarians can better relate to than it is an attempt to provide a new justification for safety nets.

I think this is evidenced in part by the fact that so many of the liberal commenters in this thread have precisely and exactly understood my argument even though I’m using language they would never use.Report

“Government schools is outsourcing child-rearing to the government. We edge ever closer to school during the summers. Children will spend more time with teachers than with their parents.” The slight of hand worked into the above, and which gregiank is getting at, I think, is that the government is somehow necessarily an alien institution.

Schools don’t outsource to the government per se, they outsource to the local community, or nearby communities, whose members make up the students/teachers/staff of the schools. They educate in this manner because of the efficiency, real or imagined, of specialized labor. That if for instance, all parents were to educate/rear their own children to the fullest, there would be quite a lot of arrested development as working adults find their time split between a 20 hour job and raising their kids. I’m not saying parents raising/educating their kids wouldn’t be more beneficial in many/most ways, but its outsourcing to the “government” seems nothing other than the rational decisions of property owners en masse looking for the best ways to increase the amount of property produced and thus available.

School all year round seems as much driven by economic/competitive necessity (especially in a global market) as by some drive to abdicate responsibility to the state.Report

@Jaybird, schools are a rather recent invention when looking at the span of human existence true enough. but they do seem to be sort of common now in much of the world. if i remember correctly they do try to things at school that we consider a good thing.Report

@Jaybird, the American standard system of 9-month public education to the age of 16 to 18 has largely been in place for going on 150 years now.

As a result, in conjunction with the Morrill Act-fomented mass accessibility of higher education, we’ve seen rapid advances in science, technology, medicine and overall quality of life — and these advances have more often than not been led by American and American-educated men and women.

Of course there will be unintended consequences. But I’m really not sure what the alternative is. Those without a high school-level education, at least, aren’t equipped for employment in the modern world.

The need for mass unskilled labor simply isn’t there anymore. For better or worse, such workers have largely been replaced, at least as long as we have the energy available to operate the machines replacing them.Report

And Travis’ point is I think the central one. Truly it’s market forces that demand so much schooling.

Many countries have more day’s of school then the U.S. Some have 6 day school weeks, and some have longer school days. Whether this is good or bad in the long run, does anyone else see a choice?

If children in India/China are willing to school twice as much as children in the U.S. and be more focused at school because of a drive to better their situation, how can U.S. workers compete by going slower/doing less?

And so while historically speaking, this might be a recent phenomenon, it seems primarily market driven, at least in the past 50 years.Report

I completely agree with what you’re getting at, but those cultural differences alone aren’t going to make up the difference of 8 extra hours of schooling a week/30 extra days of schooling through out the year.

At some point the U.S. kids are going to have to be expected to learn more (e.g. multiple languages, more time reading and writing, more time in general).

There is a huge backlash against a college degree as unnecessary for performing the vast majority of available (or recently available) jobs in the U.S. However, at the same time other countries a plunging forward. Outsourcing will be an unavoidable factor going forward, and until underdeveloped countries make rapid advances and decide that maybe their students don’t need to spend so much time in school, I’m not sure how much of a choice economically speaking we in the U.S. will have.

I completely agree with your sentiments, being a home schooled child myself. But unless perhaps through some massive online education program, I’m not sure how viable it is in relation to other countries to keep parents and children together for that much everyday.

It was possible for my family because of beneficial circumstances coming from the growth and prosperity of their generation, but I’m not sure that same luxury will be there for me when I have children.

Of course we could surrender our place as a global economic/military juggernaut and retire to the backwaters of the developed world to live in peace and quite (and this I have absolutely no problem with).Report

Religious Institutions. Religious institutions may resume services subject to the following conditions, which apply to churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, interfaith centers, and any other space, including rented space, where religious or faith gatherings are held: 1. Indoor religious gatherings are limited to no more than ten people. 2. Outdoor religious gatherings of up to 250 people are allowed. Outdoor services may be held on any outdoor space the religious institution owns, rents, or reserves for use. 3. All attendees at either indoor or outdoor services must maintain appropriate social distancing of six feet and wear face masks or facial coverings at all times. 4. There shall be no consumption of food or beverage of any kind before, during, or after religious services, including food or beverage that would typically be consumed as part of a religious service. 5. Collection plates or receptacles may not be passed to or between attendees. 6. There should be no hand shaking or other physical contact between congregants before, during, or after religious services. Attendees shall not congregate with other attendees on the property where religious services are being held before or after services. Family members or those who live in the same household or who attend a service together in the same vehicle may be closer than six feet apart but shall remain at least six feet apart from any other persons or family groups. 7. Singing is permitted, but not recommended. If singing takes place, only the choir or religious leaders may sing. Any person singing without a mask or facial covering must maintain a 12-foot distance from other persons, including religious leaders, other singers, or the congregation. 8. Outdoor or drive-in services may be conducted with attendees remaining in their vehicles. If utilizing parking lots for either holding for religious services or for parking for services held elsewhere on the premises, religious institutions shall ensure there is adequate parking available. 9. All high touch areas, (including benches, chairs, etc.) must be cleaned and decontaminated after every service. 10. Religious institutions are encouraged to follow the guidelines issued by Governor Hogan.

“There shall be no consumption of food or beverage of any kind before, during, or after religious services, including food or beverage that would typically be consumed as part of a religious service,” the order says in a section delineating norms and restrictions on religious services.

The consumption of the consecrated species at Mass, at least by the celebrant, is an integral part of the Eucharistic rite. Rules prohibiting even the celebrating priest from receiving the Eucharist would ban the licit celebration of Mass by any priest.

CNA asked the Howard County public affairs office to comment on how the rule aligns with First Amendment religious freedom and free exercise rights.

Howard County spokesman Scott Peterson told CNA in a statement that "Howard County has not fully implemented Phase 1 of Reopening. We continue to do an incremental rollout based on health and safety guidelines, analysis of data and metrics specific to Howard County and in consultation with our local Health Department."

"With this said," Peterson added, "we continue to get stakeholder feedback in order to fully reopen to Phase 1."

The executive order also limits attendance at indoor worship spaces to 10 people or fewer, limits outdoor services to 250 socially-distanced people wearing masks, forbids the passing of collection plates, and bans handshakes and physical contact between worshippers.

In contrast to the 10-person limit for churches, establishments listed in the order that do not host religious services are permitted to operate at 50% capacity.

In the early days of the Coronavirus epidemic, there were hopes that the disease could be treated with a compound called hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). HCQ is a long-established inexpensive medicine that is widely used to treat malaria. It also has uses for treating rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. There had been some indications that HCQ could treat SARS virus infections by attacking the spike proteins that coronaviruses use to latch onto cells and inject their genetic material. Initial small-scale studies of the drug on COVID-19 patients indicated some positive effect (in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin). President Trump, in March, promoted HCQ as a game-changer and is apparently taking it as a prophylaxis after potentially being exposed by White House staff.

Initial claims of the efficacy of this therapy were a perfect illustration of why we base decisions on scientific studies and not anecdotes. By late March, Twitter was filled with stories of "my cousin's mother's former roommate was on death's door and took this therapy and miraculously recovered". But such stories, even assuming they are true, mean nothing. With COVID-19, we know that seriously ill people reach an inflection point where they either recover or die. If they died while taking the HCQ regimen, we don't hear from them because...they died. And if they recover without taking it, we don't hear from them because...they didn't take it. Our simian brains have evolved to think that correlation is causation. But it isn't. If I sacrificed a goat in every COVID-19 patient's room, some of them would recover just by chance. That doesn't mean we should start a massive holocaust of caprines.

However, even putting aside anecdotes, there were good reasons to believe the HCQ regimen might work. And given the seriousness of this disease and the desperation of those trying to save lives, it's understandable that doctors began using it for critically ill patients and scientists began researching its efficacy.

Why Trump became fixated on it is equally understandable. Trump has been looking for a quick fix to this crisis since Day One. Denial failed. Closing off (some) travel to China failed. A vaccine is months if not years away. So HCQ offered him what he wanted -- a way to fix this problem without the hard work, tough choices and sacrifice of stay-at-home orders, masks, isolation and quarantine. So eager were they to adopt the quick fix, the Administration made plans to distribute millions of doses of this unproven drug in lieu of taking more concrete steps to address the crisis.[efn_note]Although the claim that Trump stands to profit off HCQ sales does not appear to hold much water.[/efn_note]

This is also why certain fringe corners of the internet became fixated on it. There has arisen a subset of the COVID Truthers that I'm calling HCQ Truthers: people who believe that HCQ isn't just something that may save some lives but is, in fact, a miracle cure that it's only being held back so that...well, take your pick. So that Democrats can wreck the economy. So that Bill Gates can inject us with tracking devices. So that we can clear off the Social Security rolls. And this isn't just a US phenomenon nor is it all about Trump. Overseas friends tell me that COVID trutherism in general and HCQ trutherism in particular have arisen all over the Western World.

It's no accident that the HCQ Truthers seem to share a great deal of headspace with the anti-Vaxxers. It fills the same needs

In both cases, the idea was started by flawed studies. The initial studies out of China and France that indicated HCQ worked were heavily criticized for methodological errors (although note that neither claimed it was a miracle cure). Since then, larger studies have shown no effect.

HCQ trutherism offers an explanation for tragedy beyond the random cruelty of nature. Just as anti-vaxxers don't want to believe that sometimes autism just happens, HCQ Truthers don't want to believe that sometimes nature just releases awful epidemics on us. It's more comforting, in some ways, to think that bad happenings are all part of a plan by shadowy forces.

There is, however, another crazy side that doesn't get as much attention because their crazy is a bit more subtle. These are the people who have decided that, since Trump is touting the HCQ treatment, it must not work. It can not work. It can not be allowed to work. There is an undisguised glee when studies show that HCQ does not work and a willingness to blame HCQ shortages on Trump and only Trump.[efn_note]Not to mention the odd fish tank cleaner poisoning that has nothing to do with him.[/efn_note]

In between the two camps are everyone else: scientists, doctors and ordinary folk who just want to know whether this thing works or not, politics and conspiracy theories be damned. Well, last week, we got a big indication that it does not. A massive study out of the Lancet concluded that the HCQ regimen has no measurable positive effect. In fact, death rates were higher for those who took the regimen, likely due to heart arrhythmias induced by the drug.

So is the debate over? Can we move on from HCQ? Not quite.

First of all, the study is a retrospective study, looking backward at nearly 100,000 cases over the last four months. That's a massive sample that allows one to correct for potential confounding factors. But it's not a double-blind trial, so there may be certain biases that can not be avoided. In response to the publication, a group doing a controlled study unblinded some of their data (that is, they let an independent group look up who was getting the actual HCQ and who was getting a placebo). It did not show enough of a safety concern to warrant ending the study.

It's also worth noting that because this is an unproven therapy, it is usually being used on only the sickest patients (the odd President of the United States aside). It's possible earlier use of the drug, when the body is not already at war with itself, could help.

With those caveats in mind, however, this study at least makes it clear that HCQ is not the miracle cure some fringe corners of the internet are pretending it is. And it should make doctors hesitant in giving to people who already have heart issues.

As you can imagine, this has only fed the twin camps of derangement. The truther arguments tend to fall into the usual holes that truther theories do:

"How can this be a four-month study when we only learned about COVID in January!" The HCQ protocol started being used almost immediately because of previous research on coronaviruses.

"How come all of the sudden this safe medicine that people use all the time is dangerous?!" The side effects of HCQ have been well known for years and have always required consideration and management. They may be showing up more strongly here because it is being given to patients whose bodies are already under extreme stress. Also, azithromycin may amplify some of those side effects.

"They just hate Trump." Not everything is about Donald Trump. If it turned out that kissing Donald Trump's giant orange backside cured COVID, scientists would be the first ones telling people to line up and use chapstick.

The other camp's response has ranged from undisguised glee -- that is, joy at the idea that we won't be saving lives cheaply -- to bizarre claims that Trump should be charged with crimes for touting this unproven therapy.

(A perfect illustration of the dementia: former FDA Head Scott Gottlieb -- who has been a Godsend for objective analysis during the pandemic -- tweeted out the results of the RECOVERY unblinding yesterday morning and noted that it showed no increased safety risk. He was immediately dogpiled by one side insisting he was trying to conceal the miracle cure of HCQ and the other insisting he is a Trumpist doing the Orange Man's dirty work.)

In the end, the lunatics do not matter. Whether HCQ works or not, whether it is used or not, will be mostly determined by doctors and will mostly be based on the evidence we have in front of us. If HCQ fails -- and it's not looking good -- my only response will be massive disappointment. Had HCQ worked, it would have been a gift from the heavens. It is a well-known, well-studied drug that can be manufactured cheaply in bulk. Had it worked, we could have saved thousands of lives, prevented hundreds of thousands of long-term injuries and saved trillions of dollars. That it doesn't appear to work -- certainly not miraculously -- is not entirely unexpected but is also a tragedy.

{C1} The Christian Science Monitor looks at 1918 and how sports handled that pandemic, and the role it played in giving rise to college football.

"That's really what started the big boom of college football in the 1920s," said Jeremy Swick, historian at the College Football Hall of Fame. "People were ready. They were back from war. They wanted to play football again. There weren't as many restrictions about going out. You could enroll back in school pretty easily. You see a great level of talent come back into the atmosphere. There's new money. It started to get to the roar of the Roaring '20s and that's when you see the stadiums arm race. Who can build the biggest and baddest stadium?"

{C2} During times of rapid change, social science is supposed to be able to help lead the way or at least decipher what is going on. Or maybe not...

But while Willer, Van Bavel, and their colleagues were putting together their paper, another team of researchers put together their own, entirely opposite, call to arms: a plea, in the face of an avalanche of behavioral science research on COVID-19, for psychology researchers to have some humility. This paper—currently published online in draft format and seeding avid debates on social media—argues that much of psychological research is nowhere near the point of being ready to help in a crisis. Instead, it sketches out an “evidence readiness” framework to help people determine when the field will be.

{C3} There is a related story about AI - which is predisposed towards tracking slow change over time - is having trouble keeping up.

{C4} The Covid-19 does not bode well for higher education is not news. They may have a lot of difficulty opening up (and maybe shouldn't). An added wrinkle is kids taking a gap year, which is potentially a problem because those most able to pay may be least likely to attend.

{C5} People who can see the faults with abstinence only education fail to see how that logic (We shouldn't give guidance to people doing things we would rather they not do in the first place). Emily Oster argues that the extreme message of public health advocates to Just Stay Home is counterproductive.

When people are advised that one very difficult behavior is safe, and (implicitly or not) that everything else is risky, they may crack under the pressure, or throw up their hands. That is, if people think all activities (other than staying home) are equally risky, they figure they might as well do those that are more fun. If taking a walk at a six-foot distance from a friend puts me at very high risk, why not just have that friend and a bunch of others over for a barbecue? It’s more fun. This is an exaggeration, of course, but different activities carry very different risks, and conscientious civic leaders should actively help people choose among them.

{C6} A look at what canceling the football season will do to the little guys - non-power schools. Ironically, they may sustain less damage due to fewer financial obligations relying on the money that won't be coming in. Be that as it may, Fordham has disestablished its baseball program.

{C7} Bans on evictions and rental spikes could have the main effect of simply pushing out small investors, rather than protecting renters. In a more good-faith economy this would be less of an issue because landlords would work with tenants. Which some are, though I don't have too much faith about it being widespread.

{C8} Three cheers for Nick Saban. Football coaches are cultural leaders of a sort. One is about to become a senator in Alabama, even. What they do matters.

The American college experience for better or for worse revolves around the residency factor. We have turned college into a relatively safe place for young adults to the test the limits of freedom without suffering too many consequences. Better to miss a day of classes because you drank too much than to miss a day of an apprenticeship or job and get fired. College was cut short this semester because of COVID and colleges are freaking out about whether they can open up dorms in the fall. The dorms are big money makers and it is hard to justify huge tuition bucks for zoom lectures even for elite universities. Maybe especially for them. California State University announced that Fall 2020 is going to be largely online. My undergrad alma mater sent out an e-mail blast announcing their plan to reopen in the fall with "mostly" in person classes. The President admitted that the plan was a work in progress but it strikes me as a combination of common sense and extreme wishful thinking. The plan may include:

1. Staggered drop-off days to limit density as we return.

This sounds reasonable but only in a temporary way because eventually everyone will be back on campus, living in dorm rooms together, needing to use communal bathrooms and showers.

2. Students would be tested for COVID-19 on campus at least twice in the first 14 days.

There is nothing wrong with this as long as the testing is available. Our capacity for testing so far in this country has not been great.

3. Anyone experiencing symptoms would be tested immediately. Students who test positive would be cared for in a separate dormitory area where food would be brought to the room and where the student could still access classes remotely.

Nothing wrong here. Outbreaks of certain diseases are not unknown in the college setting. During my senior year, there was an outbreak of a rather nasty strain of gastroenteritis. Other universities have experienced meningitis outbreaks.

4. All students would take their temperature and report symptoms daily.

This one is also reasonable but is going to involve spying on students and coming up with a punishment mechanism. How will they make sure students are not lying?

5. We would also require that socializing be kept to a minimum in the beginning, with proper PPE (masks) and social distancing. As time went on, we would seek to open up more, and students could socialize and eat together in small groups.

I have no idea how they tend for this to happen and it sets of all my lawyer bells for carefully crafted language that attempts to answer a concern or question but also admits "we got nothing." Maybe today's students are more somber and sincere but you are going to have around 500 eighteen year olds who are away from their parents for the first time and another 1500 nineteen to twenty-one year olds who had their semester rudely interrupted and might now be reunited with boyfriends and girlfriends. Are they going to assign eating times for the dining hall and put up solo eating cubicles that get wiped down and disinfected after each use? Assign times to use laundry facilities in each dorm? Cancel the clubs? Cancel performances by the theatre, dance, and music departments?

I am sympathetic to my alma I love it but and realize that a lot of colleges and universities would take a real hit financially without residency. This includes universities with reasonable to very large endowments. Only the ones with hedge fund size endowments would not suffer but the last part of the plain sounds not fully thought out yet even if my college's current President admitted: "Life on campus will not look the same as it did pre-pandemic" The only way i see number 5 working is if requiring is read as "requiring."

Seems that the theory that Covid-19 can be spread by asymptomatic people has very shaky evidence in support of it. Turns out the case this assumption was made from was based on a single woman who infected 4 others. Researchers talked to the 4 patients, and they all said the patient 0 did not appear ill, but they could not speak to patient 0 at the time.

So they finally got to talk to her, and she said she was feeling ill, but powered through with the aid of modern pharmaceuticals.

Ten Second News

Today we couldn’t be happier to announce that Vox Media and New York Media are merging to create the leading independent modern media company. Our combined business will be called Vox Media and will serve hundreds of millions of audience members wherever they prefer to enjoy our work.

In a nation in turmoil, it's nice to have even a small bit of good news:

Representative Steve King of Iowa, the nine-term Republican with a history of racist comments who only recently became a party pariah, lost his bid for renomination early Wednesday, one of the biggest defeats of the 2020 primary season in any state.

In a five-way primary, Mr. King was defeated by Randy Feenstra, a state senator, who had the backing of mainstream state and national Republicans who found Mr. King an embarrassment and, crucially, a threat to a safe Republican seat if he were on the ballot in November.

The defeat was most likely the final political blow to one of the nation’s most divisive elected officials, whose insults of undocumented immigrants foretold the messaging of President Trump, and whose flirtations with extremism led him far from rural Iowa, to meetings with anti-Muslim crusaders in Europe and an endorsement of a Toronto mayoral candidate with neo-Nazi ties.

King, you may remember, was stripped of his committee assignments last year when he defended white supremacism. Two years ago, he almost lost his Congressional seat in the general. That is, a seat that Republicans have held since 1986, usually win by double digits and a district Trump carried by a whopping 27 points almost came within a point or two of voting in a Democrat. That's how repulsive King had gotten.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. Enjoy retirement, Congressman. Oops. Sorry. In January, it will be former Congressman.

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From the Daily Mail: Deadliest city in America plans to disband its entire police force and fire 270 cops to deal with budget crunch

The deadliest city in America is disbanding its entire police force and firing 270 cops in an effort to deal with a massive budget crunch.

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The police union says the force, which will not be unionized, is simply a union-busting move that is meant to get out of contracts with current employees. Any city officers that are hired to the county force will lose the benefits they had on the unionized force.

Oak Park police say they are investigating “suspicious circumstances” after two attorneys — including one who served as a hearing officer in several high-profile Chicago police misconduct cases — were found dead in their home in the western suburb Monday night.

Officers were called about 7:30 p.m. for a well-being check inside a home in the 500 block of Fair Oaks Avenue, near Chicago Avenue, and found the couple dead inside, Oak Park spokesman David Powers said in an emailed statement. Authorities later identified them as Thomas E. Johnson, 69, and Leslie Ann Jones, 67, husband and wife attorneys who worked in Chicago.

The preliminary report from an independent autopsy ordered by George Floyd's family says the 46 year old man's death was "caused by asphyxia due to neck and back compression that led to a lack of blood flow to the brain".

The independent examiners found that weight on the back, handcuffs and positioning were contributory factors because they impaired the ability of Floyd's diaphragm to function, according to the report.

Dr. Michael Baden and the University of Michigan Medical School's director of autopsy and forensic services, Dr. Allecia Wilson, handled the examination, according to family attorney Ben Crump.

Baden, who was New York's medical examiner in 1978 and 1979, had previously performed independent autopsies on Eric Garner, who was killed by a police officer in Staten Island, New York, in 2014 and Michael Brown, who was shot by officers in Ferguson, Missouri, that same year.

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Oddly, the video was dropped by an attorney friend the men, because he thought it would exonerate them. He assumed when people saw Aubrey turn and try to defend himself, everyone would see what they did: a dangerous animal needing to be put down.